Cataloging metadata

System metadata is created and updated by the host system, and not the application software. Data Cataloging allows the addition of tags that can capture non-system metadata-specific attributes, which are stored in the Data Cataloging catalog.

Scans are jobs that are scheduled or on demand, and occur at a data source level. For example, a file system or object vault. A set of metadata records is generated with each record that captures the state of an individual file or object within the data source at the time of the scan.

Data Cataloging supports scanning the following data sources:
  • IBM Storage Scale
  • IBM Elastic Storage® Server
  • IBM Cloud® Object Storage
  • IBM Storage Protect
  • IBM Spectrum® Archive
  • Red Hat® Ceph® Storage
  • NetApp Storage Solutions
  • Dell EMC Isilon Scale Out Network Attached Storage
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
  • NFSv3 and NFSv4
  • SMB
Live event notifications are triggered by user actions on the source data. Examples are reading, writing, moving, deleting data, changing permissions, or ownership. The events generate a metadata record in real time that is stored in Data Cataloging. Data Cataloging supports live event notifications for the following data sources:
  • IBM Cloud Object Storage
  • IBM Elastic Storage Server
  • IBM Storage Scale
  • Red Hat Ceph Storage
With IBM Storage Scale you can enable live events to start a watch folder on the specified file system. The IBM Storage Scale watch folder works with Data Cataloging to capture file system event notifications and deliver them to Data Cataloging by using Kafka.
Important: If the connection from IBM Storage Scale to Data Cataloging is interrupted, the watch suspends. Additionally, events are no longer captured in Data Cataloging, which requires a file system rescan to capture the lost updates.